Movable Type Unveils Version 5.2: An Improved Rich Text Editor, Cloud Support Top the Updates

Movable Type, the popular blog software, has released version 5.2, with added support for cloud computing environments.

Movable Type is a popular open source content management and online publishing platform for creating blogs and websites, and it is free for redistribution, use or modification.

Revised Rich Text Editor

First released in 2001, Movable Type was designated as free software under the GNU General Public License in 2007. There are now more than a thousand plugins available for the platform, and it is used by such sites as BarackObama.com, Oracle’s blogs, NBC Universal and BritneySpears.com.

New features in version 5.2 include a revised rich text editor for web pages and blogs, which is designed to be more customizable, browser-friendly and AJAX-friendly.

Version 5.2 can be used under the nginx+PSGI environment, providing support across a range of server environments, including cloud computing virtual servers, CMS servers or content servers. The update also enables collections of blogs to be managed in a multi-blog environment, such as combining data from multiple blogs via the enhanced template language.

A user dashboard now helps to centralize functions commonly used by admins, authors and moderators. There is a new revision history of such CMS objects as blog templates or entries, improved AJAX-based sorting and searching features, and an enhanced list management framework for dealing with large amounts of data.

Authenticated SMTP, Browser Support

With new sitepath restriction, a System Admin can limit the publishing of content to the part of a given file system that is used by the Movable Type server. Email notifications can be sent with authenticated SMTP, and custom fields’ performance has been improved in order to provide faster rebuilds of custom field data.

The update officially supports the Google Chrome browser, starting with the latest version, Internet Explorer 8 and 9, and the latest versions of Safari and Firefox.

Other changes include a mandatory requirement that a system email setting be defined and, if it hasn’t been, the system will prompt for a system email address. A starting day of the week can be set for the calendar by the user, so that each week starts with that day. If none is set, Sunday is used as the default.

Six Apart's acquisition in 2010 left many wondering what would happen to Movable Type where it didn't really seem to fit into the plan, but it has remained an active open source solution with an active community. Japanese subsidiary Six Apart KK has taken over complete responsibility for the web content management system and we are finally seeing more updates as a result.

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